Companies often work together on joint projects or programs to develop products. Each company may have confidential information that it needs to share in order to achieve the goals of the program. This confidential information may include data about new technology, product plans, customer lists, or any other information that gives a company a competitive advantage. The companies are concerned that their confidential information should only be used to achieve the program goals and should not be distributed to others not working on the program. To address these concerns, companies often sign contracts, called non-disclosure agreements that specify the terms and conditions under which they will disclose and receive confidential information to and from each other and the steps they will take to prevent disclosure of the confidential information to third parties who are not participants in the program. A participant may be a company, an employee of the company, a contractor affiliated with the company, an individual, or any other suitable entity.
Because products are often large and complicated, often many participants may be involved. When multiple participants are working together on a program, to initiate a discussion, one participant must ask another participant to show evidence of their contract, indicating that they are authorized to discuss the program and exchange information. Since a company might have dozens or even hundreds of employees working on the program, not everyone may have a copy of the contract, and there may be confusion about its existence.